How To Get Bigger Biceps In Your Weightlifting Routines

It’s a new week people! Yes, it is Monday and for many of you it will be a painfully slow day to a week. Now, I hope you are still stuffing your face full of last week’s food posts, because you will need that energy for today’s lesson on how to build bigger biceps. Just like the 6 pac, the biceps are one of those muscle groups that are much talked about and having big biceps is something that every guy wants. Although they are smaller then the triceps muscles and other larger muscles such as the chest, back and legs, some people still have trouble building them to a noticeable size.

Why do they struggle? Smaller muscle groups are easier to build.

Well, I have been a victim of this scenario too. I remember a time when there were months of intense weightlifting workouts and this is what would happen.

1) Explosive growth (Big guns on the way)

2) Maintained growth.

3) Decrease in size (am I imagining things?)

4) OMG! My biceps have shrunk.

5) FRUSTRATION!

My main problem was that I was lifting too heavy a weight for my current strength (Ego) and not allowing my biceps to rest.

Now, it really doesn’t matter whether you have longer arms or shorter arms, it’s all about knowing how to work the biceps properly. That is what people are not doing and that is why you’ll see people struggling to build them. But rest assured, I will describe just how you can do that to build a great pair of big guns.

Find the right frequency

I’ve previously stated that you should keep your workouts explosive, that is

Heavy weights

Fewer reps

More exercises

In less time – 45 minutes rather than 1 hour (Can vary)

And you should continue with this. However, you must note that many of the exercises you will perform will be compound exercises, so your biceps will naturally get worked during those. Because of this you should then only target your bicep muscles with specific exercises like the bicep curl only once a week. This will then prevent you from over training that muscle group.

The reason why over training is bad is because your muscles will only grow when they are at rest rather then at work. You may often get that ‘pump’ look just after a workout, but that is only temporary, so make sure you rest.

Increase your range of motion (R.O.M)

Simply put… you must FULLY extend your arms (palms facing) and FULLY contract your arms (arms curled). This is the only way to ensure that you will be working all of the muscle fibers in your arms.

Here is where you can correct my mistake… and not to repeat it. Earlier I mentioned that I used to lift too heavy a weight for my current strength. This is bad because,

The main reason people wimp out of performing weightlifting exercises with fully stretched arms is because it makes the exercise harder to perform. But this will not be you! Stayfitbug.com readers are better then that.

Make sure you fully extend your arms on each rep. Bicep curls, chin ups or what ever the exercise is.

A little trick to help you accomplish this is to first briefly (like a split-second) flex your triceps before raising the weight each rep. Since the only way to do this is to fully extend your arm, you’ll know you’ve begun each rep in the optimum starting position to stimulate new muscle growth.

Squeeze those gun triggers

This actually reminds me of the unique (although a bit crazy) way to built a bigger butt. What you must do here is squeeze your bicep muscles during the exercise. At the very top of your curl, when your bicep has peaked, squeeze the muscle hard for approximately 1-2 seconds.

Your curl will make the muscle contract, effectively setting up a “road block” in your bicep. That final squeeze you add will literally force blood, water, and lactic acid into the contracted muscle, causing an intense “pump”.

In response, the muscle cells themselves begin to thicken, the capillaries within the muscle grow in number and size to hold more fluid, and stem cells split off to form new muscle fibers, already pre-programmed for growth.

These are the main ingredients you will need to start cooking up some bicep stew in your weightlifting routines, just make sure you follow this through every time and do not make the mistake that I made by stacking the barbells and dumbbells with super heavy weights that you cannot handle. That will really work against you.

Have you been incorporating these principles into your weightlifting workouts?